“Web 2.0″, “AJAX”, “BARF” - A Call To Action #
July 19, 2007.
After reading another great press release I think I now know what “Web 2.0” means. Up until now I was convinced that if you asked 10 people what it means, you’d get 10 different answers. Turns out all the tech guys have it wrong, tho.
You see, it’s all in the pronunciation. It’s not “Web two-point-zero”, it’s actually “Web two-point-oh”. As in “Web two-point-OH-MY-GOD WE’RE, LIKE, TOTALLY COOL”.
Don’t laugh.
The other day I looked with a friendly non-tech guy at some purdy web pages. (I am not dissing him for not knowing this stuff, he is not a programmer, which is completely okay. I am just telling this to illustrate a point.) It went like this:
Guy, pointing: “That looks pretty cool, what with it sliding out smoothly and all! Ah, Web 2.0, great. Is that AJAX?” Me: “No, it’s a ‘dropdown’.” Guy, pointing: “Or here, all these big image things with the text, that is Web 2.0, right?” Me: “No, it’s static images with text link overlays.”
Thank you, crazy Internet marketing hype machine. I wish you weren’t decentralized so I could visit and burn you down.
That term should be banned from the face of the net. Every time I tell people I work on the Intertubes for a living, it’s always “Wow, like Web 2.0?”.
Okay, fellow tech guys, listen up, this needs to stop. I propose answering questions like that with “No, not ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘AJAX’, we’re doing BARF now. ‘BARF’ stands for ‘Bidirectional Asynchronous Request Forwarding’, it’s hot right now. I could explain it, but it’d probably take too long. There’s a number of articles on oreilly.com, look it up, it’s great. It’s going to be in the next release of Django and Rails, man—right in the core, built-in!!”
Don’t tell me it wouldn’t work, don’t tell me it wouldn’t work.
If you’re laughing right now or thinking I am just saying this, you’re mistaken. Let’s turn the Bullshit Train around. I am dead serious.
—
Update #1: The acronym was inspired by the fine Iranian soap products, of course. Update #2: I changed the phrase from “Bitwise Asynchronous Request Forwarding” to “Bidirectional Asynchronous Request Forwarding”. It just makes more sense this way.
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I agree that "web 2.0" is one of the most generalized and overused phrases ("health insurance reform" is another) in the recent years, even within the internet engineering or product folks. As pointed out by your anecdotes, the confusion seems to be between these few things:
* dynamic HTML (even before or without AJAX)
* AJAX
* user-generated contents (possibly with the experience enhanced with dynamic HTML and/or AJAX)
I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 for the first-time user of "web 2.0".
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Sorry, AJAX / Web 2.0 is a good thing when people do it right, like preventing very slow entire page reloads just to add 100 bytes to the page.
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Of course it is. I believe you're missing my point.
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Recruiter: Hi, would you be interested in a position as a front-end engineer at our awesome startup?
ME: What is your front-end written in... JSP? PHP? Perl?
Recruiter: We use AJAX.
ME: ...
*CLICK*
If your recruiters don't know the difference... good luck to you.
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"Have you seen that video rental site ? i heard its web2.0 enabled"
:)
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http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barf
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i can see a few SOA/BARF "enterprise mashups" already.
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